Please can you check this out, I would really like some critism on this. Please?

Hey Cassie.

Overall I would say that this animation feels a little floaty. It doesn't seem to ever hit any one pose.

From a pure energy standpoint, its actually highly inefficient to move slowly from one pose to another.

With that in mind, we will typically strike a pose, and hold it (or move 'within' the pose). Then after that point is made we will move on to the next pose.

I would say you already have the dialogue clip divided into 4 different basic attitudes:

1) Dreamy as he says "Let 'em go... see 'em fly"

2) Explanatory as he says "and better still, see 'em back"

3) Excited as he says "it's dead exciting"

4) Pleading as he says "you'll have to come up there with me Elvy..."

I would recommend sitting down and sketching and sketching and sketching until you come up with poses that telegraph those attitudes and thoughts as clearly as possible.

The whole point of animation is to tell a story, so you need to get your story telling poses in there, and make sure that they do tell the story.

Once you've got that down, then you can worry about "connecting the dots" and adding in all the little details to your animation.

Keep posting updates!

-DJ

Hey Cassie!

I think this is going to be a nice piece. I like your staging, you got some very clear silhouettes and some nice poses.
First off a small technical advice, if this is Maya: When you open the attributes of your camera and set the values of near- and far clipping plane not too far apart, something like 0.1 and 10000 then the eyes should stop to flicker through the eyelids in your playblast.

I think what you can still improve in that animation is the floatiness of some of the movements.
Take a look at the fingers, for example, they are moving constantly. What they normally would do is strike a pose, and hold it, strike another pose, and hold it again. The same with the arms.
What really helps here is to act it out yourself and, if you got the possibility, film it. You will see that normally you move quite fast and hold that pose for some time rather than take the same amount of time to get to that pose.

And if you render your next playblast in twice the size and reduce it afterwards in Quicktime you get some "natural" antaliasing at the edges.

I'd like to see more!
CHeers Wolfi

Edit:
It seems that DJ was a bit faster than me posting Well now you got some advice twice

The best advice I could give is keep animating. Everybody starts at the beginning and it takes practice to get better and better. There are two things you could work on.

1 - Telegraph your ideas. Make sure the thoughts of your character read through the pose.
2 - Bodymechanics. Use the 12 animation principles to convey your ideas.

What it comes down to is that you`re doing Acting when really you should first understand the basics of animation. ll education about animation starts with the basics first, then bodymechanics and then after all that you`re ready for acting. Right now you`re cooking a three star 7 dish meal while you should just try and make a good hamburger first. And it`ll be fun to do so too!